Not The Ted Hughes One

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RPS had a splendid meeting today. Amongst our many conversation topics was the matter of conflicts of interest, and what should we do about them. Well, declare them, obv. And so I’m leaping at this chance to double down by posting this Unity-powered Iron Man webgame. Not only do I scribble comic stories for Marvel, but I’ve worked for Littleloud on another game. Oh noes! Anyway, this rail-shooter ties in with the forthcoming movie, and continues the adventures of Iron Man. He’s an American industrialist who was bitten by a radioactive household tool, and thus gained the proportionate powers of of an iron. This includes, removing creases, burning holes in expensive suits and suffering sexist accusations that using him is women’s work. It’s an efficient enough rail shooter with multiple weapons and a very light upgrade system, and the biggest problem is that the play area is surrounded by buttons leading to other parts of the site, so a misplaced click takes you there and lose your game. While approved by sponsor Dr Pepper, you suspect the delectable Miss Pepper Potts is going to be disappointed on Tony’s annihilation of everything with a barrel or tyres which looks at him funny. Iron Man Go!.

25 Comments

I was weirdly really reminded of the Rogue Squadron PC game while playing this. The graphics are really very similar. Ah, memories; it was my first real pc game. Still remember getting stuck on those gorram ATAT’s

Mouse to aim and shoot, Arrow keys to move/dodge and spacebar to fire rockets. You have got to be kidding!

It s a fun little game but the controls are awful awful awful. Don’t even get me started on the hold down to charge weapon – the speed you are travelling at you will be long past the target before it charges.

No, it’s not. If I download windows 7 from the internet and run dragon age on it, then this does not make Dragon Age a web game. And if I make a browser that shows windows 7 apps from inside a browser window, then this does not make Dragon Age a web app either.

That is exactly how unity (and flash) applications work

The World Wide Web is a distributed software platform defined through open standards by the World Wide Web Consortium. Unity uses none of these standards. it shares none of it’s properties, good or bad. It’s just another Desktop platform, like win32 or .NET. This is why I cannot run this game on my ubuntu/chrome system, even though it supports the latest web standards.

Your argument essentially comes down to “web games do not exist”. At least, not the sort of games we think of when we say “web games”.

If you want to limit yourself to Approved Web Standards, you’re stuck with plain static HTML plus cookies. I’m pretty sure Javascript is out because it’s not an actual standard (merely a de facto one), and because some devices (phones, etc.) and even some browsers (lynx, etc.) can’t do it. Conversely, VRML is a standard and should be perfectly acceptable, even though nobody can play it by default since it’s a dead standard (and again, not supported at all by some browsers).

Actually, (to be geeky, rather than pedantic or argumentative) I believe that the W3C is in the process of codifying a whole load of the javascript standards for the purposes of HTML5. Not entirely sure if they are publishing the document themselves, or merely referencing a standard produced by a different body, but the basic vanilla web will be getting a whole lot more interactive. (‘course, with MS almost inevitably lagging behind with IE, it will be a while before developers can assume support for some of the more interesting features. That said, the IE9 tech preview suggests that they are at least trying to catch up now.)

Some examples of HTML5 games: link to dailyjs.com
The example of Quake II I’m not entirely sure if its a case of it being a)Making use of proprietary code b)Making use of finalised standards in an unstable manner c) Standards compliment but bleeding edge. I’m hoping B or C, A is just cheating.

I was almost sent running away in terror by the image of Iron Man holding a Dr. Pepper, that really tested my Capitalism Tolerance Levels, as the very visage of the sight came close to triggering my autonomous Flee in Abject Terror response. Still, I gave the game a try and I can say… this is pretty much what I expected of a sponsored game, which is to say that it’s a bit crap and has questionable controls.

Oh my goodness, bookwormat. That is some crazy-ass reasoning there. So you’re saying that suddenly Flash games are not web games either?

If you honestly believe that Flash games are not web games, then I can accept that by that reasoning Unity games, when running via a browser plugin, are not web games either. However, I think you’ll have a very hard time finding people to agree with you that Flash games are not web games.

Please understand why I find this discussion important: Flash, Unity etc. are closed, proprietary platforms. The result is that I cannot play this Iron man game on my PC, (I don’t even have the option to install a plugin). It’s not running on my notebook (running ubuntu), it’s not running on my mobile (running android). I cannot link into a flash app, and I cannot access the source code of the app to make modifications.

I’m not saying every game needs to work this way. But whole idea behind the web is that applications are accessible from anywhere as long as the specifications are met.

I imagine you could perhaps avoid the website buttons issue by looking at the source, locating the URL for the actual application, and either accessing it directly or making a new webpage with nothing on it that just embeds the app?

The former is what I do for Flash games to make them run fullscreen — find the Flash URL (either via the source or via Firebug), access it directly, and switch Firefox to fullscreen mode.

(Granted, it’s tedious and beyond the abilities of many users and ought not to be necessary, so saying “the buttons are a hazard” is perfectly reasonable. Just pointing out a possible alternative for those are exceptionally bothered.)